2013 - 10 Best Television Shows

1. Mad Men
2. Breaking Bad
3. Arrested Development
4. Veep
5. Orange is the New Black
6. The Americans
7. 30 Rock
8. Enlightened
9. Parks&Recreation
10. Big Brother Australia

Mad Men's the best show on TV; deeper and richer than the rest of the field, I feel about it the way most people feel about The Wire.

Speaking thereof - how much unanimity would there be on a list of the Top 10 TV Dramas of All Time?

Not the order, necessarily - but the composition.  If we were to ask 100 television critics for their top tens, wouldn't 80 ballots contain all of the following five:

Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Sopranos
The Wire
Hill St. Blues

There'd be a greater dispute about the rest of the list (and the order, oh the order) but I'd be super surprised is there weren't 80 ballots with those 5.

Let's do the rest of my list while we're here, no particular order:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Shield
thirtysomething
The West Wing
Friday Night Lights

Were I composing a list of the 10 Best Sitcoms of all time (not today) Arrested Development would be on the list; its return will be better appreciated when the level of intricacy of its use of the Netflix model is appropriately understood.  Veep took a leap forward in its second season; Orange is the New Black was as good as its twitter buzz; The Americans is the show Homeland isn't anymore; on that Top 10 sitcom list (really, it's not coming today, stop asking) is 30 Rock, which finished strong; if you gave up on Enlightened, you missed its strongest (by a wide margin) season; Parks is the most consistent sitcom on television - and the show you didn't watch was Big Brother Australia, the best effort from my favorite global franchise.